Telephone Triage Services in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Telephone triage programs (e.g., provincial and territorial 811 programs) provide timely access to trained health care professionals who perform virtual assessments of patients’ health status and symptoms and offer self-care advice and referrals to health care services and resources. This Environmental Scan aimed to describe telephone triage programs in Canada, including what services they provide, their number and types of staff, who administers the programs, and how much they cost. It also aimed to provide a summary of some important considerations related to health equity, as well as insights into the future of telephone triage programs, including how they may incorporate emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and wearable health devices into their operations. This scan was informed through a limited literature search and a survey completed by targeted jurisdictional contacts across Canada. All 13 provinces and territories in Canada provide residents with access to jurisdiction-wide telephone triage programs. While most of these programs have been in operation for many years, the programs in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut were established within the past 2 years. Our findings suggest that telephone triage programs in Canada vary in the types of services they offer, as well as their characteristics and features, administrative structures, and associated costs. While all programs offer telephone triage and advice services, certain programs offer additional services, such as mental health crisis lines, assistance for quitting smoking or tobacco use, and consultation with a variety of health care professionals like pharmacists, dieticians, and physicians. Most programs are primarily staffed by registered nurses, but some telephone triage teams also include nonclinical intake agents, administrative personnel, physicians, nurse practitioners, and other health and social care providers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".